Magritte Goes MoMA

Summer 2013 (4) (30th June, 2013)

In 1965, René Magritte was present at the first retrospective MoMa dedicated to him. He died two years later. Now he reappears at the MoMA. Surreal, if you please. Coming Autumn Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte is honoured with an exhibition at the MoMA (Museum of Modern Arts) in New York. "Magritte: the mystery of the ordinary, 1926-1938" focuses on the breakthrough of surrealism in the artist’s work. René Magritte (Lessines 1898, Brussels 1967) first painted in an impressionist style, moved on to cubism and futurism before he fell for surrealism in 1926. Bowler hats made their appearance during the three years he was living in Paris. About eighty paintings will be on display in New York, coming from sixty private and public collections worldwide. This includes "La trahison des images" (1928-1929), carrying the insciption "Ceci n'est pas une pipe", "Les amants" (1928) and "Le faux miroir" (1928). "Magritte: the mystery of the ordinary, 1926-1938" will stay at MoMa from 28th September 2013 until 12th January 2014. Then it’ll move on to the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas (from 14th February until 1st June 2014) and then to the Art Institute of Chicago (29th June until 12th October 2014). I warmly recommend visiting both Magritte museums in Brussels too, when you’re around here. The Magritte Museum, opened to the public on 30th May 2009, is housed in the five-level neo-classical Hotel Altenloh, on the Place Royale. It displays some 200 original Magritte paintings, drawings and sculptures including The Return, Scheherazade and The Empire of Light. This multidisciplinary permanent installation is the biggest Magritte archive anywhere and most of the work is directly from the collection of the artist's widow, Georgette Magritte, and from Irène Hamoir Scutenaire, who was his primary collector. Additionally, the museum includes Magritte's experiments with photography from 1920 on and the short surrealist films he made from 1956 on. Another museum is located at rue Esseghem 135 in Brussels in Magritte's former home, where he lived with his wife from 1930 to 1954. A painting by Magritte was stolen from this museum on the morning of 24th September 2009 by two armed men. The robbery occurred just after 10 a.m., shortly after the museum opened. A man rang the doorbell, inquired if visiting hours had begun, and then pointed a gun at the museum attendant while an accomplice went inside. The thieves made museum workers and visitors kneel in a courtyard while they left on foot with a 1948 painting, Olympia, a nude portrait of Magritte's wife. The two men, who spoke English and French, set off an alarm when they broke a glass plate that protected the painting, but had already escaped by the time the police arrived. The stolen work is said to be worth about $1,1 Million. Olympia was returned to the museum early January 2012. The thieves handed back the painting because they were unable to sell it on the black market, due to its fame. Surreal? You bet! Thanks to my grandfather, I visited the exhibition called “Schatten van het Surrealisme”, Treasures of Surrealism at the Knokke Casino, along the Belgian coast, between June and September 1968, that’s forty-five years ago. I was a boy of fourteen. Little did I know that 45 years later, I would be writing about it, in English, on my Apple computer at home in Schaerbeek. Had someone shown me, the then me, a painting of the now me… the young one would have taken the other one for a fantasy, a fata morgana maybe. A ghost? Or simply another dimension of reality? Ceci n’est pas la réalité. Merci René!J30th June 2013. The museum on Place Royale: musee-magritte-museum.beThe museum in Jette: magrittemuseum.be